


A Court of Stars and Fire

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, F/F, F/M, Lucien as High Lord, Lucien as Main Character, M/M, Multi, Plot, The Book Lucien Deserved, diversity, post ACOWAR, the day court
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 06:59:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10871499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: As Lucien wishes it would all just end, everything is just beginning. With Elain's prophecy hanging over his head that he will burn his brother, melt Winter, and cut the heart of of Night, all eyes watch him as he finds himself thrown into the role of a High Lord he never expected. With a band of irritable misfits and cranky bastards as his closest companions, he has to find some way to unite them, and all of Prythian, before it is too late._______In which everyone is Queer, the Day Court advocates democracy, and Helion tells racism to go fuck itself.





	1. Ignition

**Author's Note:**

> A love letter to Lucien, to Cassian, to Vassa, and Viviane. May all my unappreciated, underdeveloped babies finally get some peace.

“I vote we send him to the prison,” Nesta said, unflinching, unyielding as she and the eight High Lords and Ladies stared down at Lucien, who knelt before them in resigned silence. 

“Seconded,” Vivianne, the newly appointed High Lady of Winter, said with more ice in her voice than the entirety of her court. Though they had never even met, Lucien could not begrudge her the decision; He knew she saw too much of his brother in him, the one who had played such an instrumental role in the assault of her best friend. 

“Nesta, Viv, I know you’ve never taken to him but he-” Feyre began to protest, the only one of the nine who was not seated. Instead her husband sat lounging in his throne, his legs stretched out so his feet rested upon her seat, whilst she paced before them all, frowning at her old friend. 

“We punished Tamlin,” Thesan interrupted. “And you made no protest there. You cannot defend this one just because he was your friend. If this is to be a Democracy of justice, none of us can play favourites. Not even his mate.”

Elain, who sat surrounded by the branches and flowers of the Spring throne, had not spoken a word since the beginning of this trial. As unmoving as a statue amongst the garden of her seat, she merely studied him with those intense, beautiful eyes of hers. Though he felt the usual pull of the mating bond towards her, it did little to comfort him. If anything, it only shamed him further. 

“I will never forgive him for what he allowed my mate to endure,” Rhysand said slowly, looking to his mate and recently made wife for guidance. “But I know she does not think him inherently bad. Tamlin maimed, killed, and abused hundreds of people for his own selfish needs. Yet we spared him death for his later actions.” No one had spoken of how without Tamlin, Rhys would be dead, but it remained a stiff, poorly concealed tension every time the exiled past High Lord was mentioned. “Lucien helped bring Vassa and the continent to us. He helped Feyre escape.”

“He also aided in the alliance with Hybern, and with his infiltration into Prythian,” Thesan pointed out, no malice in his voice, just hard logic. He shared a look with his lover and Captain, who watched from within the crowd, and returned buffered with fresh confidence in his own intelligence when he looked back to Lucien. “Those who are compliant to the evil actions of others and do nothing about it are just as responsible as those who commit the violations themselves. If we do not punish this man, then this court stands for nothing.”

This court. This Democracy. Lucien had never known the likes of it in Pythian, not even from the history books. Never before had all of Prythian come together in a common cause to pass judgement on the war criminals who had allowed monstrosities to occur during the war with Hybern. Each High Lord and Lady was given a vote, and together, all of the courts would pass judgement on those directly involved in allowing Hybern to slaughter so many humans and fae, and those who had betrayed their own people to the brute force of tyranny.

For his incompetence in protecting his people and his obsession with his own needs over the good of his court, Tamlin had been magically stripped of his title as High Lord of Spring and denounced across the land as a traitor to Prythian. Rumour had it he now dwelled somewhere in the Middle, living as more beast than man.

In his place, Elain had blossomed, quite literally. The moment Tamlin’s ties to Spring had been officially severed, wildflowers and honeysuckle vines and creepers had bloomed across her skin, stretched out from where she stood. Everywhere she went, plants and life and beauty sprung from every crack, filled the ground upon which she walked. Her hair was now wreathed with roses, her neck wrapped in coils of jasmine, and her legs entwined with snaking ivy. 

Her powers were not the tradition of Spring, for she could not transform herself or others at will, and yet no one contested that she was the new heir to the court. The Cauldron had given her and Spring a fresh start, a fresh power, one to grow and nurture instead of deceive and manipulate.

All nine of the High Lords and Ladies had agreed on this fate, and yet Lucien was missing one of his biggest supports in this trial. Helion, the man who celebrated knowledge and freedom and love above all else, had departed two weeks prior on urgent business. Apparently four of his most beloved scholars, who were abroad on the continent, had dropped out of contact all of a sudden. Thus he had left to find and retrieve them, leaving Helion at the mercy of the nobility and Nesta. 

Nesta was not a High Lady by any means, but she had been chosen as the official embassy of humanity in the Democratic Court’s rulings. And she had always despised Lucien, but more so now than ever it seemed, though he knew not why. From what he’d heard, she’d turned to ice and storm ever since the death of her father, yet he had thought she hated him. Regardless, it did not bode well for him. 

Yet Lucien did not care. If he was lucky, he’d be executed. Just living had become so difficult as of late, with his best friend now his enemy, his mate distant and untouchable, and his very purpose in life crushed into the dust of the past. A numbness had settled into his bones and stomach once the war had ended, a drifting sense of… of nothing. Of feeling nothing. Of just wishing it could be over, that he could for once just stop thinking. Stop enduring the empty pit inside his chest, that only vanished when it was replaced by the suffocating sense of guilt and self-loathing. 

Now he had come to this, this pathetic shell of himself, he would rather they’d just put him out of his misery. And so he made no protest. Said not a word, just bowed his head and waited for the axe to drop and severe it. 

“Whilst I have little fondness for my brothers,” Eris drawled from the far right of Autumn, crowned in the golden oak wreath of his court. “I must say Lucien was never the monster among us. Just ask the seer; She’ll know he hasn’t got the stomach for causing trouble. His biggest crime is being a coward.” Those words hurt the most, not because they were spoken by his blood, but because they were so true. “She can tell you he’s never going to amount to anything, so you’d just be wasting a cell.”

“But is that how we should decide things here?” Thesan retorted, ever the advocate of fairness and what was  _ right _ . “What people may one day do or not do? Can we really try people based on their capacity for evil, rather than their past trespasses? This man was Tamlin’s right hand in bringing Hybern here. Can we really forgive that based on intention?”

“If we allow the Fox to live,” Elain said, and her voice, clear and ringing through the hall, the gravity in her tone, silenced them all, even the gossiping crowd. “One of us shall die. And all of Prythian shall be forever changed. Winter shall melt. Autumn’s leaves shall burn. And Night shall lose its heart.” 

The silence lasted for too long. Someone should have declared the sentence of death sooner, because before anyone chose to speak, Lucien could feel his skin burning. “Well that decides it then,” Rhys said slowly, his voice filled with fear and protectiveness of his family. “He-” His voice fell short as Lucien became the sun. 

It hit him like a tidal wave; one minute he was filled with a lurking, creeping sense of dread, and all of a sudden he was being drowned in heat and light and the sensation of being  _ filled _ . Light erupted from his skin, hot and blinding, so that all present, even the more distant crowd, reeled back and shielding their eyes. He had no clue what was happening, why it was happening, but he could not control it. A sudden surge of power rattled through every fiber of his being, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe for how  _ much _ he was, how  _ much _ he became.  

When at last the light subsided, Feyre was the only one standing, staring not at him, but through him, her face ashen. When she spoke, her voice was filled not with shock, but with deep mourning. 

“Helion is dead.”

 


	2. The Mother

Lucien didn’t hear as the crowd whipped into an uproar, Feyre stuck between calling for silence and shouting explanations to the dumbfounded High Lords and Ladies. Only Elain was unfazed by the chaos, stoically regarding him with a steady, haunting gaze. He didn’t listen to their bickering, their outrage, their grief. Collapsed, kneeling on the floor, all he could focus on was the fading vibrations in his skin, the way his chest cavity had been filled with sunshine and yet felt all the darker for it. 

He didn’t look up until the doors to the grand hall slammed open, and he could  _ feel _ her there. A different kind of magic within him, not sunshine but fire and crimson, shivered in recognition of the one who had birthed him. His mother. 

“I just heard. Lucien’s father is dead,” said the woman who had murdered Beron in cold blood the day he refused to lead Autumn into battle against Hybern. In the days that had passed since, she had been reforged and born anew. Gone was the cowed, shamed woman of fear and isolation. When she had handed the crown to her son, she set the condition that he must take her as his primary advisor, if he so much as hoped to hold the crown for longer than a second. Wisely, he had obeyed, and in her newly reclaimed power, she had thrived. 

“Arissa,” Rhys said, standing and nodding his head respectfully. “We were just-”

“I am going to the Day Court,” she declared briskly, in the sort of tone that even Rhysand would not dare argue with. “And I am taking my son with me. He is to be the new High Lord.”

“We were just deciding to imprison him, Arissa.” Thesan had gone pale with shock, and his usually unreadable face had become strained with suppression of some masked feeling, though Lucien knew not what. He could guess, however, from the rumors that he and Helion had been past lovers, that even despite their later fighting, it was grief. 

“You will do no such thing,” Arissa announced, and her voice, once so quiet and small, echoed throughout the hall. “There are no other heirs to Day, and we do not want to risk an unknown High Lord, not now.” 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Helion has not just died by chance. He was killed.”

Silence. Silence, as every individual present, who had gathered there to see peace be restored to last, realised that their happy ending was being stolen from them. “By whom?” Rhysand asked, no longer slumped in his chair, but ramrod straight, his jaw taut. 

“I do not know exactly,” Arissa conceded, with eyes only for her son. “But he was investigating the Dark Sorcerer who was responsible for cursing dear Vassa.”   

‘Dear Vassa’ had not been permitted to partake in the Democracy Court. She had been deemed too unstable, and besides, she had refused. She’d called it stupid, to talk of peace when things were no better than they had been before. All that had changed, she said, was that the cartoonish villain was dead. The problem itself, the infection of hatred and prejudice, still feasted at the heart of all races. And now it seemed it had found a new figurehead - Or had there been another motivation for murdering Helion? 

“And you know this  _ how _ ?” Eris raised an eyebrow at his mother, the cocky act struggling to hold as he tried not to stare at his brother, who was now his public half-brother, and his fellow High Lord. 

“If you had ever experienced a mating bond, my son,” Arissa said quietly, “you would know.” 

Before anyone - and they had really all endured enough bombshell moments of truth for the year, let alone the day - could respond, she snapped her fingers at her son. “Get up, Lucien.” Her face and voice softened with a smile, and she held out her hand to him. “You have a Court to save.”  Thesan drew breath to protest, but once more she beat him to it, fixing him with the deadly gaze of a mother bear protecting her young. “You need my son now, all of you. Even you, Eris. We cannot afford to fall into descension, not now. This isn’t over.”    

 

*

 

“This is not the Day Court Palace,” Lucien observed frivolously when his mother winnowed them out of that hall of gawping crowds and infuriated, cheated rulers. Not even Nesta had dared argue with his mother. 

“You’ll have to be a little bit more intelligent than that, darling, if you wish to survive here,” Arissa said as she flung open the doors to a stable. 

They had winnowed into the midst of a vast, seemingly endless desert, surrounded by countless fields of olive tree plantations, baking beneath the glow of the sun. The only building in sight was the one before which they were standing, a large, dilapidated wooden stable, chipped and falling apart at the rafters. 

Despite its abandoned state, his mother appeared perfectly acquainted with the area. Airing the place out, she busied herself with leading out the horses and rigging them up to something concealed within the shadows of the stable. All the while, she did an excellent job of not looking at the son she had once allowed to be broken and exiled from her own home.

“You knew this was going to happen,” Lucien said coldly. He could spend hours questioning her on how on earth he was Helion’s heir, and yet the biggest surprise was how little it surprised him. He’d always felt  _ other _ from his brothers, from his father. And Helion… what he’d known of the man had struck him with a sense of inexplicable comradery, of deep, platonic affection - something he hadn’t thought the late High Lord capable of. 

“I feared,” She corrected him, not looking back at him. “Helion warned me that he might not return, the day he left. He told me- told me what to do if the worst happened.” Lucien tried his best to ignore how his mother’s voice cracked with pain, low and trembling. 

“Why?” He asked, his throat hollow, sore. His mother… Why did their first true reunion have to be so tense, so riddled with tragedy? Was that really all he could ever hope for? “Why did he go, if he knew the risk?”

“You’ll soon learn, darling. Vassa will fill you in. She’s already at the Domus, where you shall live from now on. Helion had it built himself, his own design. He…” She trailed off, and if she cried, she did so soundlessly. Lucien had enough respect left for her not to crane his head around to look, but soon she came out to meet him.

Leading the four horses with her, she emerged to reveal just what she had been constructing. The four stallions, each a different shade of brilliant gold, pulled behind them a chariot the likes of which Lucien had only heard about in legend. It was worked from what looked like - but surely could not be - solid gold, painted and carved with intricate detailing of the sun passing across the sky, the land beneath it aflame. 

“This, Lucien, is the Quadriga of Day. It has not been used in over a millennia. It is a rite reserved only for the arrival of a new High Lord into the city of Apollo. Helion rode this the day he inherited his powers. And now you too shall resume the tradition.” She finally looked at him, her eyes - his eyes - filled with such determination that he did not dare question her. “And when your people see you riding in on this, not one will question your position.” 

“And if I don’t  _ want _ to be High Lord?”

“Then there was no point in rebelling against Hybern. No point in any of it. If what we face now was capable of silencing Helion without so much as a whisper down the mating bond, then we cannot afford to have descension amongst the courts.” 

Her sharp, no-nonsense attitude softened as she looked at him, and saw the son she had raised behind the man he had become. Leaving the horses, she crossed to him and cradled his jaw in her hands. He’d hated her a long, long time, for what she had allowed to happen, and yet in that moment it all was washed away. She was his mother once more, and after everything that had happened, he wanted to collapse and weep into her arms like a babe. He wanted, for once, to feel like he was home. 

“Darling, I know that nothing has ever been easy for you. And this won’t be any different.” Stroking his hair, she smiled fondly. “But that is exactly why I know that you can, and must do this. We’ve all suffered too much these past hundred years.” She kissed him on the forehead and released him, offering him the robes she had drawn forth, folded across her arms. “You were always too bright for Autumn. The darkness of the forest never suited you. I truly believe here, you might finally be happy.” Her eyes were wet with moisture, from her lost lover, and now her changing son. “I would not do this otherwise. I’ve owed a debt to you for far, far too long.

  
Ride the chariot, my son. Become the force Prythian truly needs to change. And whatever you do, do not end up like your father.” 


	3. The Firebird and The Princess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lucien is most definitely the princess

Lucien had wandered the streets of Apollo many times before, but merely as a visiting ambassador, not as a king. Before, he had walked the dust and dirt; Now, he rode upon the air. 

His mother had not warned him of just what kind of horses carried the Quadriga, and they looked like normal, if somewhat enormous, stallions. Yet now he found himself being flown through the air by wingless beasts, high atop the civilisation below, glinting in the sunlight. Down below, fae of all shapes and sizes and species watched him.

His mother had told him it would be a sight to make them cheer. 

They did not cheer. The city looked on in silence. 

Everywhere he had gone, for all his life, Lucien had felt like an outsider, an imposter in his own skin, but never more so than now. He did not belong here; these were not his people. He did not even know what half the species he saw were. How could he rule so many that he did not even understand?

And it was so very different from spring. Lesser fae were not exiled to beyond the borders of cities and towns, repelled back to be forced to dwell in swamps and forests and caverns. In Day, more brilliant, bizarre, and strange creatures populated the streets than the robed High Fae, who came in just as many shapes and colours, from deep gold to brown as dark as night. They were almost as impressive as the city they filled.

As a young lord, Lucien had been tutored in the history of all the courts, but to see Day’s so clearly before his eyes was a whole different experience to merely reading about it. Witnessing the decimated ruins upon which the city had been rebuilt warned of what had passed, of what tyranny and noble ignorance could bring.

For all fae children were taught of Phaethon, Helion’s brother and predecessor to his title, the fae who had burned day to the ground. He had ruled for nearly six centuries, and with time had soured further and further into paranoia, petrified of assassination by his brother, by the lesser fae and humans he kept as slaves who adored the brother that advocated openly for their freedom. So one day, twisted by madness and fear, he had ignited his own city and rode through the streets on the Quadriga, breaking its ancient purpose to wield it in slaughtering his own charges.  

No one had protested when Helion beheaded his own brother. 

And everyone across Prythian had whispered and gossiped about the city he constructed in the ruins of his brother’s genocide. Of how he refused to rebuild elsewhere, lest his people forget the lesson his brother’s corruption had taught them all. Of how Day, which had always been a place of learning and advanced philosophy and mathematics, was now the epitome of aesthetic architecture, of beautiful, sprawling white villas and temples and theatres and public offices. Together with his neighbour Dawn, Helion had built the city and society he’d always dreamed of, where fae of all kinds were free, and soon humanity followed. 

Trying to ignore the ominous silence that hollowed out the ground beneath him, Lucien studied the enormous buildings constructed from brilliant white stone, the pillars, the impossible domes and arched ceilings and vast temples, and tried to see them all as  _ his _ . As his to watch over, to protect. Yet whilst their beauty certainly inspired awe, they also felt so alien. He was not used to such open, bright spaces. A life of running and treading lightly had taught him to live in the shadows. 

Swooping through the air on a chariot of flame and sun was hardly living in the shadows. Against his will, he’d been dragged out into the daylight. 

Looking at his hands, pale and calloused from the time he’d spent imprisoned in a holding cell awaiting judgement, he thought on what was to come. Of how all he wanted to do was run back to the shadows.

But he would not. He  _ could _ not. Feyre, Elain, Rhysand, even Tamlin: he owed too many too much. His mother, whom he had thought he understood and had rid himself of completely, had given him this unwelcome, unexpected destiny. And though it terrified him, though it violated every screaming instinct he had, he would try to embrace it.

For them. Until he could learn to do it for himself.

 

*

 

The palace, or Domus as his mother had called it, betraying her familiarity with Day, was far smaller than Lucien had expected. Every High Lord he had met - even Rhysand - had presided over his people in some grand mansion or castle or palace, even his father, who viewed such things as weak and vain. Yet Helion’s home was barely larger than most of the villas Lucien had passed, with matching complexes branching off at the sides to home courtiers, guests, and family alike. 

By far the most impressive part of the location was the garden, though it was nothing like the gardens of spring. Acres of fruit trees stretched out from the Domus, interspersed with carefully corrugated water systems. In the centre of the Domus and its two opposing wings, an enormous bronze sundial basked in the sun’s rays, surrounded by white stone benches and grape vines, thick and heavy with produce. 

It was here that Lucien landed, by no choice of his own, the horses guiding him knowing their route without hesitation or steering. There weren’t even any reins to hold onto, which Lucien had admittedly found a little unsettling when he’d been suddenly launched into the sky with nothing to hold onto. He made a mental note to add that to the list of things his mother had failed to warn him about.

Thankfully, his experience with the Illyrians had given him the desensitisation to not vomit after the rapid ride, but he still stepped from the chariot upon unsteady feet. His vision was spinning so much with nausea that he did not at first notice the figure marching towards him. 

At first, he was so stunned that he did not even think how impossible it was that Vassa was walking on  _ legs _ towards him in broad daylight. He was too busy staring at her skin, her face, her  _ eyes _ . 

For she was like no human he had ever seen. Withered feathers protruded from her skin, scraps of fibre and bone like sharp protrusions of naked spine, the nubs of feather that pierced her skin with such raw violence that he had to fight the urge to shrink back from her, from witnessing such a battle upon her flesh alone. And her face did nothing to ease her onlookers. Her nose was long and hooked, her chin sunken, her ears only half formed and plastered to her skull. 

What truly shook Lucien to his core, however, were her eyes. They were not eyes, had not pupils or whites or irises or  _ flesh _ , but rather flame. Fire danced within her sockets, licked up across her eyelashes, which smoldered but did not seem to burn. She was- she was-

“I have been bound. You can stop your gawping now; It’s hardly befitting of a High Lord.” Crossing her arms over her chest, she scowled at him - at least, he thought she scowled, it was hard to tell on her unfamiliar, contorted features. “You have Amren to thank for the fact that I can even talk to you during the day. She helped seal me to this form, to defy at least part of the curse. Being silenced for half my life’s hours was really starting to piss me off.”

Sighing, she tossed her hair - which was thickened and graduated into splaying, split featherlike strips at the ends - back over her shoulder. “But this isn’t about me. Helion brought me here to help  _ him _ , and now your mother wants me to help  _ you _ . At least until you help me.” Scrunching her nose up at him, she looked him over, and judging by her grimace, found him sorely lacking. “And for now, that apparently means not letting you make a complete idiot of yourself. If we lose control over this court, we’ll never be able to deal with Nadine or Artyom.”

Lucien’s confusion obviously showed upon his face, for she sighed and again and shook her head. “I’ll explain all that later. For now, we need to prepare you for your election. We don’t have long to ensure that the people won’t denounce you.”

“My what?”

“You election,” Vassa repeated, sighing and rolling her eyes. “Aren’t I supposed to be the ignorant one here on fae matters? You should know that Helion did away with the coronation ceremony and instated the election system.” In response to Lucien’s blank expression, she continued, “The people will vote. If they vote with you, you will be officially accepted as High Lord. If they vote against you… you will be stripped of your powers. All of them. He put it in place to stop his brother’s downfall from happening again, but in this case, it’s more of an annoyance.

You’ll be fine though. Arissa knows these people. Knows how to endear you to them, even if you’re completely unsuitable.” At least Lucien wasn’t the only one who felt he didn’t belong here, thrown into this madness. “As soon as she arrives, we can begin briefing you. But for now… for now you really need a bath.” 

Suddenly self-conscious of the grime and dirt that plastered his skin and hair, Lucien nodded in submission. He had spent his life obeying others; at least that came naturally to him. 

  
Vassa held out a hand, her fingers thin and curled like claws. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it. 


End file.
